There’s just one thing that’s not working – the Shared news panel in the sidebar. I can’t see why not, so I’m assuming it’s a feed problem, at least until tomorrow.

Hopefully not too long.

The following post attempts to make sense of of what we covered in that discussion. I’ve been tweaking it on and off for several weeks, but I’ve never been totally happy with its clarity.

Today is the last day of the month, so to hell with it. I’m going to press the button and publish.

Let me know what you think.

I’ve just failed to post for almost a whole month owing to extreme busyness. My apologies.

Let’s hope I can get properly back on stream again.

I’ve just noticed that Dangerous Thinking is No 1 on Google.co.uk (Web) for SEO copywriting blog.

Can I lay claim to Dangerous Thinking being the top blog on SEO Copywriting in this country?

Looking back today, it seems it was anything but OK. WP and K2 are just not playing nicely together. Bluntly, I wish the guys at K2 would get their act together and upgrade their theme properly so it works with the latest version of WordPress – the kludge plug-in doesn’t override WordPress widgets as advertised. In fact, it’s looking like it’s time to jump ship and find a less problematic theme for this blog.

My apologies for the lack of links and questionable usability this week.

Over the next few days, I’ll be getting Dangerous Thinking back to where it should be, as I adapt my sidebar content to WordPress widgets.

Content is unaffected, of course

I use FeedBurner on my blogs as well as our clients’, where I see its strengths more as a promotional tool than a stats package. Yet, of course, there are some very useful metrics that you won’t find in Google Analytics or elsewhere.

Some people have been anticipating a merging of FeedBurner stats with Google Analytics. That would be very welcome – I find I end up getting different figures from different sources, and therefore value integration – but somehow I wonder if we’ll see it.

While in some cases, such a solution may integrate better with the rest of the site, the leading blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Movable Type are mature and powerful, offering just about everything you’d need. For what it’s worth, I’ve used both over a period of many years but I choose Wordpress these days. Indeed my two most used blogs (Dangerous Thinking and Meals on Blogs) are both Wordpress-based.

If you’re planning on using on a blog for SEO reasons, there’s one absolute killer in favour of using one of the mainstream blogging platforms – they have reliable protection against comment spam, when some of the bespoke platforms we’ve seen do not. (I’m assuming the bespoke platform will generate clean HTML, offer RSS feeds and give you comparable publishing flexibility.)

Why am I stressing comment spam protection? If you’ve not run a blog before and haven’t suffered under the onslaught of porn and dodgy pharmaceutical vendors, you may not appreciate the true implications of not having spam protection.

Earlier this year, Bad Behavior (one of the anti-spam measures I’ve experimented with) reported over 3000 attempted comment spams in just 7 days on this very blog. Think about the overhead of deleting each of those manually. I just let the software do the business.

So before you allow yourself to be lured into having a bespoke blogging package installed for you, at least be very clear you will have adequate comment spam protection. Whether I use Akismet alone, or a combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior, the result is the same – no comment spam finding its way on to this blog. And hardly any intervention required from me.

With comment spam out of the frame, it allows me to get on with blogging. I’m sure that’s what you’ll want to do with your blog, too.